Poor Usability in Data Processing

The databases community works hard on the scale, performance, and correctness of the storage and query processing systems that our users depend on. Researchers are therefore frustrated to see less principled, and often incorrect 2010s implementations of concepts that were introduced in the 1970s. The lens of usability can help us understand how certain systems see adoption, regardless of the soundness of their implementation. Usability deficiencies in best-of-class systems can explain the success of systems with poor transactional semantics or unideal query languages, and even the use of spreadsheets for large-scale data management.